Why Other Musicians Study Bach And Why Harpists Should Too - PHH 109

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want me may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. And yes, my friend, you read that episode title correctly. This episode is about Bach. The Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach. I'm sure some of you are thinking that this is a waste of a podcast episode, that you're never going to play any music by Bach, and since he didn't write any music for harp anyway, this couldn't possibly be relevant to your harp playing. Let me tell you, you couldn't be more wrong. Bach may not have written anything for harp, but his influence is felt by every composer and musician since his time. You probably know that French composer Charles Gounod wrote his beautiful Ave Maria melody as a vocal addition to Bach's Prelude in C. But perhaps you didn't know that the trumpet solo on the Beatles song Penny Lane came about after Paul McCartney heard trumpeter Dave Mason performing the Brandenburg concerto number two, one of his most famous works, and the same concerto which is featured in the movie the island of Dr. Moreau. Other movies that feature the music of Bach range from Disney's Fantasia to the Godfather to Master and Commander to Boogie Nights. But Bach's music is more than just amazing music. It's also a music theory education, a technical proving ground, and a time honored model for crafting a melody. You may associate Bach's music more with vast quantities of notes rather than melody, but discovering the basic yet profound musical principles embodied in Bach's compositions can change the way you understand all of the music you play. I know it did for me. Now, obviously I won't be able to uncover all the layers in Bach's music on this podcast and we're not turning this into a theory discussion, but what I want to do today is to talk about what's meaningful to us as harpists and musicians. We'll clarify a few of the musical terms that are associated with Bach, and I'll show you how you can use his music to better understand chords and phrasing and flow, to develop your fingering technique and to grow as a musician. Plus, we'll talk about which Bach pieces might be ideal for you to add to your repertoire, or at least to your practice list. I also have some facts and stories about Bach that you could include in program notes or just repeat to impress your friends with your amazing musical knowledge. So whether you're a Bach fan or maybe a not yet Bach fan, I think you'll find something in this episode that's really going to be interesting and helpful to you in your harp journey. And I want to encourage you to listen all the way to the end of the episode, because I'm going to be telling you about a free workshop that I'm giving in just a few days that will help you with the works of another composer. So stick around and I will tell you about that in just a little bit. But let's get started with some basics about Bach.

Perhaps the first thing that every music student learns when they study Bach is the word counterpoint. Now, I know you know what counterpoint means, right? We're juxtaposing two different things, but in a musical context, counterpoint is actually the study of melody, and more specifically, how one melody can be combined with another, so that when they're played simultaneously, they create a complete musical texture. This idea of two melodies working together at once was actually something that preceded harmony, preceded chords. And when it came to the study of melody and that contrapuntal combining of two melodies, Bach was a master. Now, Bach was also a master of harmony, as we'll talk about in just a moment. But this melodic idea, the idea that a beautiful melody can be produced and then another melody put with it to create that complete musical texture, was something that he was specifically dedicated to in his work and. And something that he was clearly a master of. One of the.

Musical forms in which we see this in Bach's work is the fugue. The fugue as a musical form is kind of like a canon or a round on steroids. I mean, when you think of a simple round like row, row, row your boat and how one part follows another, that's one level of this musical form. The next level would be a canon. Think about The Pachelbel canon, where you have one bass line that's sustaining the entire thing. But the melody has variations, and it's in its originally orchestrated form with three separate violin parts. You hear the same melody going through those three violin parts at different times, just the way you do in a round like Row, Row, Row youw Boat. It's just a lot more sophisticated. Well, a fugue is more sophisticated than that. Way more sophisticated. But it's kind of the same idea where we have one melody that plays a part in the entire composition, and we hear that melody played out in different voice parts, sort of the highest part of.

The texture, or the middle part or the low part, or we hear it starting on a different note, or we may hear it even upside down or backwards. That's part of the compositional stuff that happens in here. Now, Bach wrote a lot of fugues specifically for the organ or for the harpsichord. We don't have fugues for the harp, and they're quite complicated to play, although many master harpists have made transcriptions of Bach's works, including the fugues, and they're really quite wonderful. But just to give you an idea of what I mean when I talk about this contrapuntal combination, I'm going to play just the very opening snippet of one of his more familiar fugues for organ. This is the. The G minor fugue, which is known as the little A fugue, starts out with something called a subject and is essentially the theme. And the Bach G minor fugue starts with a theme like this you'll probably recognize.

So that's the subject of the fugue. Now, in the course of this fugue, we hear this played out any number of different ways. And what I want you to picture is the idea is an organist playing the fugue, and they've got a right hand line playing one part, a left hand line playing another part, and then they have the petals on the organ playing a third melody. So there will be three melodies going at the same time in the fugue. Now, I'm not going to play very much more of this for you, but I just want to give you an idea of what happens. So there's that first subject that I just played for you, but right after that subject finishes, and that would be in the right hand part, the left hand comes in with something very similar, but not quite the same. It starts out with the same subject, same theme idea, but in a different key.

So it's the same idea. But of course, they don't happen at quite the Same time. So what happens in this fugue is that we start with the main subject and then that left hand line comes in. I'll give you just a little taste of it.

So there you go, it goes on from there. And then of course there's a. The pedal line on the organ, which I can't play at all.

At least not with my feet. So we can stop there. But you get the idea how those two melodies combine. It's a very complex sounding texture, but it's really just two melodies working together. Another musical form that Bach used to work on much the same thing was the invention. We have two part and three part inventions that Bach wrote for keyboard. And the two part inventions are a little bit more accessible for harpist. They're still not great in terms of, especially if you're a lever harpist, they're not so easy. And the fingering, of course was written for a keyboard player who's using all five fingers and we don't. But they're excellent studies in both working with your fingers and working out these fingerings that go together or not. And in the independence of the hands, having both hands play an equal melodic role in creating this musical form. Right, this little musical piece, one of the inventions that you might like. The first invention from his book of two part inventions. Pretty familiar. And it's not quite as systematic as a fugue is. And you know, it's not quite that same sort of canonic, driving kind of a thing. The voices are similar, but they're not identical. The first of the two part inventions in his book of two part inventions is in C major and the right hand part starts like this.

And etc. Now that's just the right hand. The left hand has something similar but not identical. The left hand part starts this way.

It's not quite the same, but together they're quite lovely.

It's nice, right? But you can see what's so interesting about these compositions. It's one hand and another hand. No chords, just beautiful music created with these two interesting and complementary melodies. Bach originally wrote these inventions in a book for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who was also a student of Bach's. Obviously, and these were meant to be instructional pieces. He's. This is what Bach wrote in the beginning of this collection. He says that these are for forthright instruction wherewith lovers of the clavier, that would be the. The piano, the harpsichord, especially those desirous of learning are shown in a clear way. Not only one to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress, two, to deal correctly and well with the three obligato parts. Those would be those three part inventions. Moreover, at the same time, to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well. But most of all, to achieve a cantabile style of playing and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition. That cantabile style of playing is the flowing of melody that Bach was evoking in all of these, these pieces. So this cantabile playing for us harpists, these are great not just for fingering and learning to play two voices clearly. Think again about the independence of the hands. Imagine how much better your left hand would get after working on an exercise like this, right? But think about how this would improve your legato. Your legato playing to get these lines to sing, to be smooth, to be fluid. That's part of the wonderful just study kind of element that's here in Bach's music. So in addition to being beautiful, they have things to teach you, right? There aren't easy on the harp, but little snippets of them, if you're interested, can be lots of fun. You'll find some transcriptions available in various books. You might just start with the piano piece and just see how much of it you feel like tackling. You don't have to go into the weeds if it looks like the petals and levers are going to be too confusing. You don't have to worry about the trills and the ornaments. Just take a few measures and see if you can get your hands to do those two separate things at the same time and make them sound beautiful. What a tremendous training ground for our technique and our musicality. Of course, Bach was an organist, but Bach was primarily a church musician. Now, earlier in his career, he had worked in various royal courts with different degrees of success, and his employers didn't always see eye to eye on things. And when the job in St. Thomas Church in Leipzig was open, Bach decided to apply. There were some other very famous musicians applying for that job at the same time, Telemann and Kuhnau among them. Bach was sort of third in line. And when Telemann and Kuhnau both turned down the job.

Bach was invited to audition. He prepared two of his cantatas. Now, cantatas are choral works, and they usually have some solo parts and some choir parts, and they're usually accompanied by instruments of varying forces. And he took two of his early cantatas, 22 and 23, I believe, to perform for his audition for the people of St. Thomas Church. And he was accepted and given a contract. And this was the church where he composed so much of his wonderful music. Now, because this was a church job, part of his duty was to compose a new cantata every Sunday for the church service and for liturgical holidays. Now, some of these for holidays got considerably expanded. And these are the works you might know, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, all about Christ's suffering and death on the cross. And these were performed generally on good Fridays at the church. But every Sunday, he wrote a new cantata about appropriate Bible sentiment for that particular day. So we have over 300 cantatas that we know Bach composed while he was at St. Thomas. Over a hundred of those we believe to be lost. So who knows what gems there might have been that we will never know. But to step down from the. The big scope of the passions or the cantatas, all of those cantatas contained chorales, and chorales are essentially hymns. In fact, some of the chorales that Bach is best known for, we sing in church to this day as hymns. But Bach had his own way with those chorales. Most of the time, those chorales weren't ones that he had written himself, but they were chorales that were standard in the church, written by other people that he put his own spin on. He made, in essence, his own arrangement. And his arrangement was in the form of a harmonization. So this is where the harmony, where the chord part comes in. So he chose different chords. He chose to have his singers do things slightly differently than the way the original composer had written the chorale. And that's what made them so exquisitely beautiful and so uniquely Bach. So let me just show you one of the more famous examples so you can see the kind of spin that Bach put on a chorale. This chorale is one that Bach used in the St. Matthew Passion. This is more or less the original version of the chorale written by a composer named Paul Gerhardt. And he wrote this before Bach was born. So this chorale would have been in the standard repertoire of any church choir of the day. This we know. The words, we know this by are O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. And here is the original Gerhardt version. It'll sound a little different from what you're used to.

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Now, that was the original. That's the material that Bach had to work with. But he made the chorale all his own. And this is the way you are probably more used to hearing that piece.

Granted, it's a little awkward on the harp. It would be so much nicer either sung with four voices the way it was intended, or in an actual harp arrangement, rather than just playing note for note, the vocal lines. But you can hear the difference between what the com. What the original chorale was like and how Bach dressed it up. Now, that chorale he used in the St. Matthew Passion, not just once, but he used it five times. And in each of those five times that we hear the chorale, the harmonizations are different and in some cases, very different. This is not all that different from what we do when we arrange a piece for harp or when we make a slight tweak to a different, you know, to a piece where it comes out just slightly differently. It's the same kind of thing. But this was what Bach was doing to make his living and, of course, to give us some of the most amazing.

Vocal music that the world has ever heard. But how do the Bach chorales help us as harpists? Well, these chorales are wonderful studies in reading those various vocal parts. If you've ever looked at any hymn book, you've seen that there are soprano lines and alto lines and tenor lines and bass lines, and that we can tell them apart by which clef they're in and which way the stems go. Being able to read those lines and decipher them is a terrific way to help you learn about chords, to help you practice note reading, and to just get the feel for what all those different voice parts are doing and how they're contributing to the chords. It can help you learn to look at chords in a new way, not just to identify them as C chords or F chords or first inversion or root position or seventh chords or whatever, but to really look at the parts that move from chord to chord, not just the vertical sonorities, but how do those notes move horizontally? As harpists, we pay so much attention to those vertical things, right to the up and down chords, having to get all those fingers onto the strings at the right time. But to think about them in a more melodic context and look at how those voice parts move is a wonderful discipline for us as harpists. So I would encourage you to do that. Remember also that these chorales show up in different ways. Perhaps you're a fan of the Yezu Joy of Man's Desiring. It's got that beautiful melody. Da da da da da da da da da. Right. Well, that melody is Bach's introduction to the chorale. The actual chorale is the part that starts.

That's the chorale, and that's there. It just has all this wonderful ornamentation around it, all these beautiful notes and extra melodies and things that make it so Beautiful. And I think that's part, perhaps the most important part of what makes Bach's music so interesting and so moving. It's this blend of complexity and utter simplicity. It's all the notes. But, yes, there are a lot of notes, but there's so much more. And so much of it comes down to just a very simple core melody, like those chorales, like those beautiful soaring melodies of something like the air on the G string, which is another piece, you know, and if you don't know that, you know it. You can look that up. Now, of course, there are some great pieces of Bach that works so well on the harp. His Prelude in C, that very famous one that Gounod set the Ave Maria melody to. You know that one, right? It's this.

That's a wonderful piece on the harp and something that every harpist would be well advised to learn. Yezu Jovmes, Desiring Sheep May Safely Graze the Arioso. All of these make wonderful recital pieces or pieces to play in church or for weddings or just to play for yourself. You'll find lots of great arrangements of these pieces, ones that work well on the harp and aren't just the. The harpsichord music or the organ music that you have to work from. You'll find lots of those. So search your favorite music site and take a look at them. But I'd love to know that our discussion today gave you something new to think about. When you listen to Bach's music, or when you consider it for yourself, consider making it part of your repertoire. The idea that it's not just about a bazillion notes. There may feel like there are bazillion notes, but that doesn't mean that that's about the notes, that it's about all those notes. It's about so much more. And primarily it's about melody. Remember, we talked about the word counterpoint and how these pieces, so many of them, are one melody put against another. You can even look at chorales that way, those hymn tunes, right? You've got the melody, yes, in the highest part. But those other three voice parts, the alto, the tenor and the bass, they have their own melody as well. And it's the combination of those melodies that make the chords. When you think about singers singing, they're not singing vertical sonorities, are they? Those voices are blending to create sonorities, to create chords, if you will, that are created just by the simultaneous motion of these horizontal melodic lines that they're singing. It's a very different way to look at music. And something that is so helpful, so important, and almost a profound discovery for we harpists who think so much in the vertical dimension. As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about Bach's music. Every time I listen to it or play it, not only am I moved and inspired, but I also find something new. Something new to hear, something new to discover, something new to learn. So it's a pretty important aspect of my music making and I hope that I've inspired you to try it just a little bit. But if you want a different side of Johann Sebastian Bach, while most of his music was church music or organ music or keyboard music, there are some beautiful orchestral suites like the Brandenburg Concerti. But if you're a fan, as I am of coffee, you might enjoy listening to his Coffee Cantata. It's very funny. You may. It's all in German, so you may need to look up a translation, but it's a very funny story and it's a celebration of coffee. So, you know, there's just something else that I think is wonderful about Bach. I love my coffee too. At the beginning of the show, I told you I would have something fun to invite you to something fun to talk about. This Friday, June 23rd at 11:00am Eastern Time, I will be giving a free workshop on not Bach, but Debussy on Clair de Lune, how to play it, all the ins and outs. We'll be talking rhythms and pedals and levers and fingering and enharmonics and harmonics and all those good things. And you will find the link to join us in the show notes. So do pop down to those show notes and join us. I am the you'll find the link also in the Harp Mastery hub. So if you are one of our community in the Hub, which is our free but social media free online community, I urge you to join us there. You'll find all the information to join me for my free Clair de Lune workshop. That's this Friday, June 23rd. So I hope to see you there next week on the podcast. I'll be talking about something quite a bit lighter. We'll be talking about how to make your summer productive and fun. Because you don't just have to work all through the summer, we can make your heart playing extra fun. And that's what we'll be talking about next week on the podcast. In the meantime, please remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening my friend and I will see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp happiness every day. See you next time.